Money Management Executive Latest News

Personalized features and friendly user interfaces helped Fidelity Investments, American Century and New York Life win "excellent" designations from Boston-based Dalbar for the market research firm’s second quarter 2004 analysis of mutual fund Web sites.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s deputy director of the Division of Investment Management – and a major player in the agency’s attempt to fix the mutual fund industry – is leaving her position there to take on a role as senior vice president and compliance executive for securities regulation and conflicts management at Bank of America.

Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. and financial advice provider GuidedChoice announced Thursday that they are providing customized advice to participants in more than 100 plans administered by Schwab Retirement Plan Services Inc.

A Colorado federal judge Thursday rebuked regulators and Invesco for failing to reach a swift settlement over charges that the mutual fund firm coordinated an improper trading scheme, Rocky Mountain News reports.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said that while still an employee, Warren Lammert, who left Janus Capital Group in March 2003, brought a hedge fund into the company’s mutual fund pool and allowed it to time the market, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Setting a precedent for itself, The National Association of Securities Dealers will not allow a Seattle-based firm to open mutual funds for new clients for 30 days, citing the company’s allowance of improper market timing trades.

Northern Trust Global Investment Services plans to expand its wealth management, asset servicing, asset management, fund accounting and hedge fund administration businesses internationally. Stephen Potter, the head of Northern Trust's international market segment, said the company plans to expand in markets such as Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the Nordic region, both by opening regional offices and making strategic acquisitions.

Federal securities regulators churned out two more mutual fund reforms last week as directed-brokerage practices were officially junked and portfolio managers met with new standards for disclosure.

In the midst of the largest scandal in its 80-year history, and as a spate of new regulatory requirements gets underway, the mutual fund industry faces a major overhaul in the way it distributes funds.

WASHINGTON -- While the annuity industry remains hush-hush on the topic of the market-timing cases being brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Attorney General, this silence does not indicate a lack of opinion. Speakers and attendees alike voiced their views on the brewing market-timing trouble and regulatory implications for the variable annuity industry here at the Regulatory Affairs Conference sponsored by the National Association for Variable Annuities of Reston, Va. And the consensus was that preventing market timing in annuities is more complex than preventing it in mutual funds.